Le Cerque and Le Cerque dell’Est
oliodop@lecerque.com - bedandbreakfast@lecerque.com
An introduction (page 3 of 3)
The olive
yard includes seven hundred, 35-year old trees: the main type is the “leccino” variety (70%),
that is very resilent to low temperatures and to diseases and give our
olive oil the scent of green grass, the taste of the apples and a lively
flavour; another southern variety of olive trees (10% “coratina”) give our
olive oil a pleasant almond taste and a light bitter and hot flavour.
The olive fruits are picked by hand, or with the aid of a pneumatic
rake comb, when they aren’t fully ripe. They are stored in baskets
and milled within 48 hours. The olive mill is a modern three-phase engine
working “in continua” at low temperature. The olive oil is stored in
stainless steel containers and is preserved in a room at controlled
temperature (more than 14°C in the winter and less than 24°C in the summer).
The farm produces an average of 1300 litres of
excellent organic extra virgin olive oil, with the strong annual oscillations that are typical of the olive
trees.
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Now-a-day..
Collevecchio, Le Cerque,
us, our
olive oil
Now-a-day, in Sabine nothing has changed. The 4 of us
- Laura, Marta, Domizia and Lucilla - women of the third millennium, grow
our olive trees and walk along country paths, wearing havy boots and
followed by our dogs just like the ancient Sabine lady used to. The only difference is that all of us
were born in Rome and came back to countryside in order both to take care
of our small paradise, “Le Cerque” estate, and to carefully produce extra
virgin olive oil.
Our 21 ha estate is surrounded all about by big
oaks (local dialect cerque), laurel bushes, corn and fodder fields,
rosemary hedges, where foxes, porcuspines, bees, fireflies and many types
of birds live. In a cave, the ruins of a clay pipe are evidence of the
water work of an ancient Roman “villa rustica”.
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Le Cerque: detail of the garden
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